City of God

I really wanted to watch this with a friend, but as both of has have the decision making abilities of oxen, we kept leaving it at “We’ll watch it next week” and thus the year ended and I flew home having never gotten around to watching it. It’s seriously sad too; we’ve had the DVD PLUS a downloaded copy since mid-February. I swear, I need to work on making decisions. I am always the “Yeah, okay, sounds fun” guy and, though it often leads to great times, more assertiveness would surely lead to me watching more movies! And playing more videogames. And going to the comic store and then rambling about Superman Red/Superman Blue and its effect on the comics industry with regards to The Clone Saga in the Spider-Man comics which ran concurrently with it.

Maybe it’s a good thing I’m not very assertive.

This movie was pretty great. I really didn’t know what to expect. JW’s friend Ali told me that there were beaches and cities and various other locales and they were all very very pretty so I was pretty excited about that. But I have to say, I wasn’t expecting a dark hard boiled crime drama set in Brazil. This is like a less campy Scarface set in a ghetto. There are crime lords and shootings and people rising through the ranks and all-out gang wars. It’s the type of film that thrived from the late-seventies to the early-eighties before dying out. The whole crime genre was ressurected mostly by Quentin Tarantino who infused it with comedy and witty dialogue to create ironic shades-of-grey characters.

And while I love Quentin Tarantino, his immitators became pretty annoying. Sure, Gross Point Blank is phenomenal, and Boondock Saints earns points for having Willem Defoe scream “THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT!!!!!” with so much gusto that I could listen to it for hours, but there are a lot of sad sack Tarantino-wannabes that have taken the intricate plotlines of your Godfather type films and infused them with neurotic characters and slapstick comedy. City of God is a straight-up crime drama with hard-as-nails characters and a plot that weaves all over the place.

It’s beautifully directed, well acted and features strong characters. Due to the bootleg nature of my copy, the subtitles were filled with grammar errors that sometimes baffled me, but I was still able to keep up with the film. A question for anyone who has seen this in the threatre or in another non-bootleg format, and forgive my crassness: That part where the women are talking about how pleasurable it is to masturbate with a warmed-up banana while your man gives it to you anally; is that actually in the film? I mean, I guess it was because they SHOWED the banana but is this sex act actually common in Brazillian ghettos? Is it more widespread? Is my ignorance of this the reason I can’t get a date? Should I be buying bananas in bulk? By ‘in bulk’ am I referring to the quantity or relative size of the banana? Why don’t I end this paragraph already?

City of God, bananas aside, is one of those films that has SO much plot — it literally begins with the main character as a child and shows his aging process through to early twenties — that it seems to be over in twenty minutes. It’s one of the most absorbing films I’ve seen in a while, and would likely have made my Top 10 list if I was more assertive. It’ll be there for the revised list in December.

Highly recommended.

Matt